Jongmin Gim
Abstract
The modern hard disk drive is a complex and complicated device. It consists of 2--4 heads, thousands of sectors per track, several hundred thousands of tracks, and tens of zones. The beginnings of adjacent tracks are placed with a certain angular offset. Sectors are placed on the tracks and accessed in some order. Angular offset and sector placement order vary widely subject to vendors and models. The success of an efficient file and storage subsystem design relies on the proper understanding of the underlying storage device characteristics. The characterization of hard disk drives has been a subject of intense research for more than a decade. The scale and complexity of state-of-the-art hard disk drive technology calls for a new way of extracting and analyzing the characteristics of the hard disk drive. In this work, we develop a novel disk characterization suite, DIG (Disk Geometry Analyzer), which allows us to rapidly extract and characterize the key performance metrics of the modern hard disk drive. Development of this tool is accompanied by thorough examination of four off-the-shelf hard disk drives. DIG consists of three key ingredients: O(1) a track boundary detection algorithm; O(log n) a zone boundary detection algorithm; and hybrid sampling based seek time profiling. We particularly focus on addressing the scalability aspect of disk characterization. With DIG, we are able to extract key metrics of hard disk drives, for example, track sizes, zone information, sector geometry and so on, within 3--20 minutes. DIG allows us to determine the sector layout mechanism of the underlying hard disk drive, for example, hybrid serpentine, cylinder serpentine, and surface serpentine, and to a build complete sector map from LBN to the three dimensional space of (Cylinder, Head, Sector). Examining the hard disk drives with DIG, we made a number of important observations. In modern hard disk drives, head switch overhead is far greater than track switch overhead. It seems that hard disk drive vendors put greater emphasis on reducing the number of head switches for data access. Most disk vendors use surface serpentine, cylinder serpentine, or hybrid serpentine schemes in laying sectors on the platters. The legacy seek time model, which takes the form of a+b√d leaves much to be desired for use in modern hard disk drives especially for short seeks (less than 5000 tracks). We compare the performance of the DIG against the existing state-of-the-art disk profiling algorithm. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art disk characterization algorithm, the DIG algorithm significantly decreases the time to extract comprehensive sector geometry information from 1920 minutes to 7 minutes and 1927 minutes to 180 minutes in best and worst case scenarios, respectively.
- Aboutabl, M., Agrawala, A., and Decotignie, J.-D. 1998. Temporally determinate disk access (extended abstract): an experimental approach. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS. 280--281. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Allen, B. 2004. Monitoring hard disks with smart. Linux J. 117, 9. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anderson, D., Dykes, J., and Riedel, E. 2003. More than an interface?SCSI vs. ATA. In Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies(FAST). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bairavasundaram, L. N., Goodson, G., Schroeder, B., Arpaci-Dusseau, A. C., and Arpaci-Dusseau, R. H. 2008. An analysis of data corruption in the storage stack. In Proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bairavasundaram, L. N., Goodson, G. R., Pasupathy, S., and Schindler, J. 2007. An analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS. 289--300. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cho, C. D., Shim, J. S., Jeong, J. S., and Kim, B. J. 1998. System decoder for high-speed data transmission and method for controlling track buffering. US Patent 6282367.Google Scholar
- Davy, W. 1998. Method for eliminating file fragmentation and reducing average seek times in a magnetic disk media environment. US Patent 5808821.Google Scholar
- Denehy, T. E., Arpaci-Dusseau, A. C., and Arpaci-Dusseau, R. H. 2002. Bridging the information gap in storage protocol stacks. In Proceedings of the Summer USENIX Technical Conference, 177--190. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Di Marco, A. 2007. The geometry of commodity hard-disks. Tech. rep., DISI-TR-07-07, DISI-Universita di Genova.Google Scholar
- Ding, X., Jiang, S., Chen, F., Davis, K., and Zhang, X. 2007. Diskseen: Exploiting disk layout and access history to enhance I/O prefetch. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elliot, R. C. 2005. Information technology?scsi block commands 3 (sbc-3). American National Standard, Project T 10, 14776--322. Working draft.Google Scholar
- Gim, J., Chang, J., Jung, H., Won, Y., Shim, J., and Park, Y. 2008. Hard disk drive for HD quality multimedia home appliance. In Proceedings of Computational Sciences and Its Applications (ICCSA). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gim, J., Won, Y., Chang, J., Shim, J., and Park, Y. 2008. Dig: rapid characterization of modern hard disk drive and its performance implication. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Storage Network Architecture and Parallel I/Os(MSST/SNAPI). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Huang, H. and Shin, K. G. 2007. Partial disk failures: using software to analyze physical damage. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST), 185--198. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Huang, L. and Chiueh, T. 2000. Implementation of a rotation latency sensitive disk scheduler. Tech. rep. ECSL-TR81, SUNY, Stony Brook.Google Scholar
- Jacobson, D. M. and Wilkes, J. 1991. Disk scheduling algorithms based on rotational position. Tech. rep. HPL-CSP-91-7rev1. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.Google Scholar
- Lohmeyer, J. 2005. Scsi-3 standards architecture. http://www.t10.org/scsi-3.htm.Google Scholar
- Lumb, C. R., Schindler, J., Ganger, G. R., Nagle, D. F., and Riedel, E. 2000. Towards higher disk head utilization: extracting free bandwidth from busy disk drives. In Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation(OSDI), 87--102. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Macon, Jr, J. F., Ong, S., and Shih, F. 1997. Asynchronous read-ahead disk caching using multiple disk I/O processes adn dynamically variable prefetch length. US Patent 5600817.Google Scholar
- Masiewicz, J. 2004. Information technology?at attachment wit hpacket interface?7, volume 1?register delivered command set, logical register set (ata/atapi-7 v1). American National Project Standard, T13 1532D. Volume 1. (Working dratf)Google Scholar
- Matrixstore. 2008. How long before 100x better HDD energy efficiency? http://www.matrixstore.net/2008/11/12/towards-100-times-better-energy-efficiency-from-hard-disk-drives.Google Scholar
- McKusick, M. K., Joy, W. N., Leffler, S. J., and Fabry, R. S. 1984. A fast file system for unix. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 2, 3, 181--197. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mesut, O. and Lambert, N. 2002. Hdd characterization for a/v streaming applications. IEEE Trans. Consum. Electron. 48, 3, 802--807. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nisha, T., Remzi, H. A.-D., and Patterson, D. 1999. Microbenchmark-based extraction of local and global disk characteristics. Tech. rep. CSD-99-1063, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
- Park, S. and Shin, H. 2003. Rigorous modeling of disk performance for real-time applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 2968, 486--498.Google Scholar
- Ruemmler, C. and Wilkes, J. 1994. An introduction to disk drive modeling. IEEE Computer 27, 3, 17--28. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schindler, J., Griffin, J. L., Lumb, C. R., and Ganger, G. R. 2002. Track-aligned extents: matching access patterns to disk drive characteristics. In Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies(FAST). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schindler, J., Schlosser, S. W., Shao, M., Ailamaki, A., and Ganger, G. R. 2004. A tropos: A disk array volume manager for orchestrated use of disks. In Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies(FAST). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schlosser, S., Schindler, J., Papadomanolakis, S., Shao, M., Ailamaki, A., Faloutsos, C., and Ganger, G. 2005. On multidimensional data and modern disks. In Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies(FAST). 225--238. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Seagate. 1999. SCSI interface, product manual 2.Google Scholar
- Shin, D. I., Yu, Y. J., and Yeom, H. Y. 2007. Shedding light in the black-box: structural modeling of the modern disk drives. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Triantafillou, P., Christodoulakis, S., and Georgiadis, C. A. 2002. A comprehensive analytical performance model for disk devices under random workloads. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 14, 1, 140--155. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Won, Y., Chang, H., Ryu, J., Kim, Y., and Shim, J. 2006. Intelligent storage: cross-layer optimization for soft real-time workload. ACM Trans. Storage 2, 3, 255--282. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Worthington, B. L., Ganger, G. R., Patt, Y. N., and Wilkes, J. 1995. On-line extraction of SCSI disk drive parameters. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS, 146--156. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Extract and infer quickly: Obtaining sector geometry of modern hard disk drives
Recommendations
Reducing disk I/O times using anticipatory movements of the disk head
Finding a good rest position for the disk head is very important for the performance of a hard disk. It has been shown in the past that rest positions obtained through anticipatory movements of the disk head can indeed improve response time, but ...
Relieving the burden of track switch in modern hard disk drives
In this work, we propose a novel hard disk technique, "AV Disk", for modern multimedia applications. Modern hard disk drives adopt complex sector layout mechanisms to reduce track and head switch overhead. While these complex sector layout mechanism can ...
High performance RAID system by using dual head disk structure
HPC-ASIA '97: Proceedings of the High-Performance Computing on the Information Superhighway, HPC-Asia '97An approach for designing high performance disk array systems using a dual head disk structure is presented. In general, both I/O bandwidth and reliability can be significantly improved by using disk array systems, i.e., RAID. However, the performance ...
Comments